And people have that experience with all kinds of things, that once experienced in a bad way are hard to get past.

We all have liturgies, informal or formal, and the ones we are trying are still pretty informal. Other than a gut reaction to them due to your past experiences, what is intrinsically wrong with what we have been doing for example?

What if the old ones are false too? For e.g., in the church where I grew up, liturgy was more about obsequious posturing and performing, and to make those not in the know feel lowly and unholy. That’s why it scares the beejebus out of me and makes my blood run cold. I simply cannot get past thinking that anyone involved in liturgy simply loves the false pomp and ceremony of it all – the star at the front reading pre-prepared stuff out in a ‘godly’ voice so that other people think they’re anointed, the person in the congregation who needs not read the screen as he’s memorised it before bedtime a week ago.

I relished finding a church that stripped all that ostentatiousness and fanfare away.

I’m not wanting to argue for any form of liturgy, rather that we understand we have liturgies already, and for some of us using old forms might help break out of the false ones we have, and vice versa.

Jase

Jase, are there MP3s available of that part of your conference? I’d be interested to hear them x

What isn’t mentioned is that liturgy relies very heavily on symbols, and the problem with most Christian litury is that the symbols have lost their meaning for a lot of people, and are based on ideas that make no sense to the rest.

A re-investment of meaning into the symbols that underpin a lot of our liturgy would do a great deal to help us.

Since you’ve named the name of today’s Evil One (Consumerism), it seems important not to forget that, before liturgy was a weapon of exclusion, it was for centuries a weapon of religious and political conformity, pre and post-Cranmer. Not until the effects of the wider Reformation and Renaissance placed individual rights above those of the family, sect and (in theory) the state, did liturgy lose its repressive power. If the results of the struggle for human rights include rampant individualism and consumerism in our day, I suggest we have to learn to live with them.

If we’re not careful, therefore, any life choice (with or without the need for initiation) can be branded as merely an act of consumerism – particularly if we don’t personally care for what’s being chosen.

I don’t think, furthermore, that liturgy can be implemented as an antidote or an alternative to individualism in the West, as some seem to suggest. We have to face the fact that choosing to do liturgy will always be an individual, um, choice.

What might be more fruitful is to look at the extent to which our faith communities and acts of worship can be moved from being collective to being corporate. This is hard because it seems easier to gather and maintain a crowd of interested individuals than it is to nurture a living, breathing body of interdependent disciples. I feel that focusing on Jesus and his kingdom movement teaching and practice must be the foundational and constant reference for this. This is source, whereas liturgy is expression.

So I would suggest that liturgy is more mood-altering than life-changing.

So there, I have accused liturgy of being a weapon of exclusion and forced inclusion, and a mood-altering drug. I’m still not against it, but I would like to see the current discussion taking some of these problems into account. I worry that there’s more amnesia than anamnesia.

How is liturgy exclusive? I’d respond that we are all liturgical, that liturgy is not just the official formal liturgies. In that sense how does the way we do things regularly exclude others.

High and low and non church can exclude as much as each other.

Then should liturgy be excluding. In some sense I think it should, it should be something you have to learn, something for people to have to be initiated in, especially in a consumer culture that thinks exclusion is overcome by making a payment.

But on the other hand, our liturgies need reveal and explaining, so that people understand and review them, and know why we have them.

Warmly, Jason